Best Practices to Develop a Business Strategy

Tip 1: Try to break down the long-term plan into shorter lenses to be reviewed. For example, you can try asking yourself: “what should be my long-term goal? How much market share do I want? How much should I expand?”

Tip 2: Be sure to integrate short-term enablers, mid-term strategic initiatives, and your long-term mission and vision. To illustrate better, if you are trying to join the fashion industry, you will need to think about the goal of the enterprise in the market. An example of a vision could be to offer elegance and comfort for everyone, whereas an example of a mission might be to make available fashion at affordable prices. Whereas your midterm strategic initiatives could be efficient marketing campaigns, setting up a sustainable manufacturing process, and optimising the costs so you can fulfil your long-term mission and vision.

Tip 3: After strategising, implement and measure to stay on track. For instance, you can try creating a data reporting system to analyse the critical elements of KPI (key performance indicator) and implement and modify strategies accordingly.

Tip 4: Be sure to ask yourself how linked your strategy is to the ongoing operations. Make sure that your vision matches what is going on in your operations. For instance, if your goal is to create a grocery delivery application with the main aim of ‘fast delivery, you will need to allocate a lot of resources to optimise the delivery system to ensure that your delivery services will be very efficient.

Tip 5: Understand your starting position by setting fundamental business choices and aspirations with the designated team. For example, you can set up a business culture, teach the company's values to the team members, and teach them to be customer-oriented, team players, and honest.

Tip 6: You should scope the market size, growth, trends, opportunities, and challenges. To illustrate, if you are a streaming platform for Arabic movies and series, you will need to look for how much money is spent annually on Arabic entertainment, the percentage of people using online services to watch Arabic content and look for the trend when it comes to online payments for streaming platforms.

Tip 7: Try to research the competition by collecting robust data and extracting lessons. Attempt to analyse the current leaders on the market for the product you are trying to create/sell, what the customers think about these products, and what the competitors did right or wrong in their strategies.

Tip 8: Map your stakeholders and collect their inputs needed through meetings, discussions, events, etc. Try to look for who is affected by what you are doing; it could be the employers, investors, or customers. What can you offer them, and what can they offer you?

To wrap things up, strategising is pretty simple when you apply the above 8 tips. So, let me leave you with one last tip, always remain open to changes and be flexible to act fast! Stay #Vital. 

It is essential to remain flexible because there will always be unexpected changes in the market. And sometimes, things might not go according to your plan, so you always need to adapt, so you do not fall behind. And during these times, it is crucial to have a clear vision and direction for your company’s survival, which your business strategy provides!

So stay vital! Get to it – you’re going to be glad you did!

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